Provisioning physical access credentials or logical access credentials or both to physical tokens incurs a heavy logistical burden.
Smart cards are increasingly accepted as the physical token of choice for securely controlling physical access. A report entitled “Using smart Cards for Secure Physical Access” from Smart Card Alliance of New Jersey, USA, published in July 2003, provides a primer on smart card-based physical access ID systems. When such a system is to be implemented in an organization, the smart cards must be issued and deployed to the users of the system. Various costs are necessarily incurred, including, for example, the cost of the smart cards, planning of the system, manned issuance stations, coordination of users to get to the manned issuance stations, the loss of productivity and other costs incurred by users to travel to the manned issuance stations.
HID Global® of California, USA provides idBank™ smart cards that contain hundreds or thousands of electronic access credentials. Privaris Inc. of Virginia, USA produces plusID™ personal biometric fingerprint tokens with a keyfob-like form factor. Credentials from an idBank™ smart card can be provisioned to a plusID™ token when the token is physically presented to a personal computer upon which an enrolling application is installed.
It will be appreciated that for simplicity and clarity of illustration, elements shown in the figures have not necessarily been drawn to scale. For example, the dimensions of some of the elements may be exaggerated relative to other elements for clarity.